The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) announced that it gain three major new members in ARM, AMD and Nvidia. The group was formed last year by Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix to create the next-generation open source video codec.
"The open source availability of our AOMedia Video project with active contributions from industry leaders marks the beginning of a new era of openness and interoperability for Internet video," said Gabe Frost, Executive Director, the Alliance for Open Media."We’re delighted to welcome AMD, ARM and NVIDIA to the Alliance for Open Media, reflecting the importance of hardware support to achieve broad industry adoption,” he added.
The new codec is supposed to replace the current generation codecs such as VP9 and HEVC. Mozilla (Daala), Google (VP10), and Cisco (Thor) were already working on their own next-generation codecs before they decided to share their resources and knowledge to create one “best codec” that would be royalty-free and standardized for the Web by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Although the VP8 codec was already standardized for the WebRTC protocol by the IETF, it hasn’t gained that much adoption from chip makers and other major platform stakeholders. Even Mozilla stuck to using an open source implementation of the h.264 codec made by Cisco. Google’s VP9 codec hasn’t gotten much more adoption than VP8, either, even though Google uses it to encode all of its YouTube videos now.
The HEVC, created by the same organization that made the h.264 codec, has its own problems, mostly related to expensive royalties and patent challenges from other groups.
The new codec from AOMedia is meant to solve all of the existing issues by being:
Interoperable and open;Optimized for Internet delivery;Scalable to any modern device at any bandwidth;Designed with a low computational footprint and optimized for hardware;Capable of consistent, highest-quality, real-time video delivery; andFlexible for both commercial and non-commercial content, including user-generated content.
The fact that now all the major chip vendors, including ARM, AMD, Intel and NVidia, have embraced it ahead of its release means that all the new chips will support it from day one. With IETF standardizing it as a Web protocol, it should be embraced by all the browser vendors, as well.
Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware. You can follow him at @lucian_armasu.
